1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a silicon nanodot film, more specifically, to an apparatus and method for manufacturing the silicon nanodot film for light emission in nano-size photonic devices.
2. Description of the Prior Art
According to recent research, it has been known that an emission efficiency is significantly increased due to quantum confinement effect wherein silicon clusters of nano-size are used as light emitting materials. Additionally, the emission range can be adjusted from a visible emission to a near infrared emission by adjusting the size of the silicon nanodot. In particular, in Er-doped semiconductor light emitting devices, the efficiency of exciting erbium can be significantly improved through the increase of interaction of silicon nanodot with an Erbium (Er) element, which is caused by phenomenon that the distance between the silicon nanodot and an Erbium (Er) element is shortened.
In this regard, in case the Erbium, which has been applied for EDFA (Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifier), is doped on a thin film made of silicon nanodot, the light emitting devices can be operated in various ranges of frequency, and hence it is expected to have a significant influence. Therefore, to compensate drawbacks of amplifying signals through optical pumping in modern long-distance communication systems, a SOC (system on chip) device incorporated with small-sized optical devices such as an optical amplifier can be manufactured through semiconductor integration technology, or a simplified process.
However, silicon material, which is a representative of a semiconductor material, has a serious drawback in application of a photonic device due to its indirect band gap. To utilize the silicon material in the photonic device, a method for doping the silicon with light emitting materials is required, and a technique for forming the silicon structure at nanometer levels should be ensured.
In the prior art, the silicon nanodot film was doped with Erbium by ex-situ ion implanting process, or by pulse type laser deposition process using silicon target doped with Erbium after forming the silicon nanodot film by plasma enhanced chemical vapor method (PECVD).
However, in the former case, damage is induced by a high energy acceleration and doping concentration can not be uniformly adjusted. In the latter case, a possibility of contamination is caused by impurities while manufacturing procedure of the target and different kinds of targets are manufactured in accordance with the doping concentration. For these reasons, the prior art techniques can not be applied to current semiconductor process techniques.